making social media work for your business

People are sceptical about the impact social media could have on their business.

But, do it properly, and it allows you to reach out to your customers, monitor the competition and build great ideas for unique and informative content.

Here’s our quick guide to social media and how it can be a success for your company.

Tactics

Try to develop a tone of voice and don’t be afraid to of self-promote. How you approach this is important but it is possible to talk about your success stories and/or client work without sounding arrogant or putting people off.

Your customers/potential customers are important so help them as much as you can and try to answer their questions. You don’t have to promote your competitors but you should promote other news and content sites.

By using and becoming familiar with analytics (there are several free analytic tools) you’ll be able to see when your audience is online and when the best time to post is.

When your followers start to pick up try to collate as many of their email addresses as possible and when you have done this offer your product/service to them via email.

Finally, don’t fear the competition. Look at the content they are producing and what it is that causes people to engage with them.

There’s nothing wrong with gathering ideas in order to generate some social momentum.

Engagement

You don’t just have to wait for people to engage with you. Having great content is fantastic but it doesn’t stop there. Praise people for informative posts and interact with your audience as often as possible.

Following back is helpful and sharing other company blogs/posts is a good way to build relationships.

Like most marketing activities you only get out of the exercise what you put in. Listening to the feedback you get through your social channels is likely to help with future content ideas.

Measuring

Is your social media strategy making an impact on whatever it is you are trying to sell?

To answer this, you must understand how to measure your social media activity.

Google Analytics is one of the more popular tools to use but brands in general have been known to struggle with social media measurement.

Five benefits of measuring are:

– To find out where your traffic is coming from.

– To see how many people are clicking on your social shares.

– To monitor how many conversions you are getting from social media.

– To view how many people are speaking about your brand compared to your competitors.

– To see if the content you are producing is relevant and of good quality.

Once the above results start to filter through you will see the benefits of measuring.

Tools

This is probably one of the most important decisions you will have to make because all the other elements (some of which we have already highlighted) will work through your chosen social media management tool.

Be selective and ask plenty of questions before you decide which one you like.

As well as scheduling tweets, engagement and measuring, social media management tools can help you find out vital information about your followers as well other useful brand and industry information. Priceless.

Audience

The conversation you have with a family member is likely to be different to the one you have with a friend. With this in mind, tailor your approach to the audience you are trying to reach.

When you have established this you will see that social media audience/relationships/interaction is important because of the following:

– Social Media helps you learn about your audience.

– Social media helps you target audiences more effectively.

– Social Media helps you find new customers and expand your audience.

– Social Media allows you to receive instant feedback from your audience.

– Social Media allows you to create meaningful relationships with your audience.